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NEWS
La région centrale (Michael Snow, 1971).
- Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States for a second time.
- Major film distributors declined to pick up Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice (2024) under threat of legal action from the Trump campaign, just as recent documentaries, including No Other Land and The Bibi Files (both 2024) have been neglected.
- In a stunning blow to film preservation, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) has laid off sixteen employees from its archive and library departments as part of a broad “restructuring” plan. Several were instrumental archivists who had been at the Academy for years.
- Not only are Moroccan filmmakers receiving plum spots in international festival lineups, but investments from foreign productions, a new streaming service, and growing public support to save local cinemas have generated optimism about the country’s film culture.
DEVELOPING
- Jaume Collet-Serra replaces Ric Roman Waugh as the director of an upcoming Cliffhanger (1993) reboot, and Lily James will be climbing mountains in Sylvester Stallone’s stead, with Pierce Brosnan costarring. This marks the third upcoming Collet-Serra project, alongside Netflix’s Carry-On, out next month, and The Woman in the Yard, due to be released next year by Universal.
REMEMBERING
The Wiz (Sidney Lumet, 1978).
- Quincy Jones has died at 91. The American record producer and arranger left an indelible mark on both popular music and cinema, scoring such films as In the Heat of the Night (1967), In Cold Blood (1967), The Wiz (1978), and The Color Purple (1985), the last of which he also co-produced. His legacy extends from the Sanford and Son theme song to “Soul Bossa Nova,” which was used for the Austin Powers films—including Goldmember (2002), in which Jones made a beloved cameo.
RECOMMENDED READING
No Other Land (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Rahel Szor, and Hamdan Ballal, 2024).
- “I wanted to jump out of my skin, to be somewhere else and avoid the story altogether. But looking away is a privilege, one that is overwhelmed by the responsibility to bear witness and to share in the grief.” For The Nation, Ahmed Moor examines the uncompromising documentary No Other Land (2024), which still doesn’t have US distribution.
- “The film tunes in to—and even builds a texture of—uncomfortable, dissonant resonances. Following suit, if we took a speculative stethoscope to artifacts, could we hear these frequencies?” For Art Papers, interdisciplinary artist Anthony Hawley considers Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024) by excavating alternative histories through the sounds of artifacts.
- “The specters of adult affairs which silently ensnared my world—sex, violence, politics, depression—were at best vague allusions in the family-friendly media flung my way. These art films unveiled a world both lustrous and sad, something otherwise shrouded from my child-eyes.” For Cinema Year Zero’s special issue on piracy, Rine Achelur-Beshup chronicles his autodidactic film education via torrenting.
- “You will always do what you want. You will find, always, a way to do what you want to do. For theFilm Stage, Nick Newman interviews Portuguese film producer Paulo Branco about working with the likes of Raúl Ruiz, Manoel de Oliveira, and David Cronenberg.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Fairytale (Alexander Sokurov, 2022).
- London, through November 15: Pushkin House presents a multi-venue retrospective of the work of Soviet and Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov, including the UK premiere of his most recent film Fairytale (2022).
- London, through January 2: BFI Southbank presents “Echoes in Time: Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema,” a two-month program that focuses on two major periods in the country’s cinematic development.
- New York, through December 22: In conjunction with an exhibition at the International Center of Photography, Anthology Film Archives hosts the film series “We Are Here: Scenes from the Streets” that “explores the intersections of street photography and cinema,” featuring work by Khalik Allah, Jem Cohen, John Wilson, and others.
- Chicago, September 3 through December 10: Siskel Film Center continues its Propaganda and Counterculture Lecture Series with Jorge Sanjinés’s The Secret Nation (1989) next Tuesday, November 12.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Le Cinéma Club presents the online premiere of a new restoration of Chantal Akerman's J’ai faim, j’ai froid (1984), showing through November 7.
- Neon has released a trailer for Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End (2024), the rare musical to actually advertise its songcraft, in theaters December 6.
- Neon also released a trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s first-person spectral thriller Presence (2025), out January 24.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
The Fury of the Wolfman (José María Zabalza, 1972).
- “He must be the most barrel-chested monster in horror-movie history.” Z. W. Lewis writes about the life and work of Paul Naschy, the Don Juan of the lycanthropic world.
- “Kneeling, he carefully tugs at the snake’s tail with the fingertips of both hands, once, twice, until her head reappears from the hole.” In an excerpt from Viennale’s TEXTUR #7, Jessica Sarah Rinland considers the interspecies encounters of Roberto Minervini’s Low Tide (2012).
- “Ramsay’s filmmaking is animated by a deep curiosity about how moving through grief can intensify the immediate texture of living, creating extraordinary moments of concentrated perception.” In our latest One Shot column, Rachel Elizabeth Jones looks at the idea of drowning throughout Lynne Ramsay’s filmography.
WISH LIST
Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood, 2024).
- Screen Slate’s Juror #2 (2024) shirts celebrate the paltry theatrical release of Clint Eastwood’s latest (and last?) in the style of a tour tee.
- Metrograph will soon publish the first issue of their new print publication, The Metrograph, which includes contributions by Daniel Clowes, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Amalia Ulman, Steve Martin, and more.
EXTRAS
- Mickey Rourke details his recent visit from the Secret Service with Piers Morgan and ends with a chilling recommendation.